Go East, Young Man! (part 3)

Since I would be gone for a week or two, I didn't want to drive to Roseville and leave my car where it might pick up a ticket or tickets before I got back, and taking a train from Oakland left too much chance for delays, so I decided to take a bus. My feelings toward riding busses were not dissimilar from my feelings for a root canal done by a student dentist, but it would only be a couple of hours and I wouldn't have to worry about being late. Unfortunately, such was not the case, and from that point onward I swore I would never even think about taking a bus again.

At the Greyhound Terminal in San Francisco I re-packed my gear carefully so that there was plenty of padding around the wine bottles, remembering a nightmarish experience several years before when I caught a piggyback train on the fly out of Union Pacific's Oakland Yard and a bottle of wine broke as I swung up onto the car, but with all of the train noise going on I didn't notice it until I duck-walked up under the wheels of the trailer and sat down to enjoy my ride over to Stockton. After smelling the distinct odor of wine I thought that we must have just passed a winery, but as the smell persisted for several minutes I came to the horrible realization that it was my wine I was smelling, and after quickly tearing open my pack I was faced with the task of not only being out of wine, but having to pick a zillion pieces of broken glass out of my sleeping bag in the dark at 60mph! Fearing that the wind would eventually end up tearing the sleeping bag from my grip, and leaving me without wine and a sleeping bag, I crawled inside with all of my clothes on and rode it out until we got to Oroville the next morning for a crew change, when I bailed out and walked over to a café for breakfast, having to explain to the waitress that although I might have looked and smelled like a bum, I was quite sober, and after relating my tale of woe she graciously told me that my meal was on the house.

Getting back to the bus station part of the story, since I was one of the first people on the bus, I didn't want my pack to be shoved to the back of the luggage compartment where it might take forever to retrieve in Roseville, so I diligently waited with it until the driver was almost finished with all of the packing, and offered to "help" him put it on the outer edge, but he immediately became enraged that I didn't consider him strong enough to manage by himself. I politely told him that it was "heavier than it looks", but he almost brushed me aside and miraculously picked the pack up with one hand and deftly positioned it where it wouldn't have a chance to tip over. I couldn't believe how strong he was, and as he closed the door to the luggage compartment he muttered "been doin' this fer 25 years..." as he walked up into the bus.

When we stopped in Sacramento to pick up more passengers I perched like an eagle along side of the bus to make sure that nobody so much as bumped my pack, and as we all filed back inside for the short ride to Roseville I noticed that the driver had been replaced now by an incredibly overweight Black woman. I hoped that she too would posses some Herculean talents when it got time to get off, but such was not the case. There was something wrong with the air conditioner, and we all had to wait for a maintenance person to show up. This is where my weeks of planning and hefty telephone bills went down the tubes, as we sat in the bus for what must have been a half hour before anyone showed up to try and fix things. My spirits then took a nose dive when the driver announced that we would all have to go outside and board another bus.

Again I offered to "help" with my pack, but this time the driver accepted with a smile. Again I stood by as the luggage was re-deposited in the bowels of the new bus, and we were finally on our way, almost two hours after we arrived. I probably could have walked to Roseville in the time it took us to drive there, but after lifting my pack on my shoulders I realized that it was much, much easier to take the bus. As I suspected when I staggered into the freightyard, my hotshot Portland train had "just left", but there was a junker heading out in an hour or so, and I resigned myself to sit down and make the most of my situation, which I did by pulling out the first bottle (after sniffing my pack cautiously) and kicking back on a warm summer evening.

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